We’ve covered generic classes and interfaces but what can we do if we simply want one of our methods to be generic and not the whole class or interface? We can create generic methods to do just that, for example:

public class StringBox {
  private String data;

  public <T> boolean isString(T item) {
    return item instanceof String; 
  }
}

StringBox box = new StringBox();
box.isString(5); // Returns false

In the example above, using the class StringBox, we created the generic method isString() with a generic type T as a method parameter. It’s important to note that generic methods need to include the type parameter, <T> in our example, prior to the return type, even if the return type is void. The generic method is called like any other method as shown.

We can also do this with static methods and their signatures have the same requirements except for also needing the static keyword. For example:

public class StringBox {
  private String data;

  public static <T> boolean isString(T item) {
    return item instanceof String; 
  }
}
StringBox.isString(5);  // Returns false

In the example above we see how we made the isString() a static method by simply adding static to the method signature. We call it by using the class name instead of an object.

Let’s practice creating generic methods.